Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose

TL;DR: The porch neighbor whose insults provoke Jem into destroying her camellias. The withered old woman to whom he is sentenced to read aloud every afternoon for a month. The morphine addict who used Jem's reading sessions to push her doses farther apart and die clean. Atticus's chosen example of what real courage actually looks like.

Spoiler level: spoiler-light. Discusses her death and the reveal at the end of Chapter 11.

Snapshot

Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose lives two doors down from the Finches on the way into town. She is on her porch most afternoons in a wheelchair under a lap blanket, hurling accusations at any child who passes. She is, by Atticus's measure at the end of Chapter 11, "the bravest person I ever knew."

Role in the story

Mrs. Dubose is the protagonist of Chapter 11 — the chapter that closes Part One. Her insult against Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson sends Jem into a rage that culminates in him beheading every camellia bush in her front yard. As punishment, Atticus sentences Jem to read aloud to her every afternoon for a month. The reading sessions get steadily worse — she nods, drools, jerks, gets thin and yellow in the face — and the alarm clock on the dresser is the timer that marks how long Jem has to stay. After her death, Atticus reveals what the reading was actually for: Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict who had decided to die owing nothing, and she had used Jem's afternoons to push her doses farther and farther apart.

Personality in plain English

Vicious-tongued. Opinionated. Brittle. Outwardly cruel and inwardly fearless. Underneath the vinegar is an old woman who decided she would die clean and who arranged her own withdrawal around a small boy's after-school readings. She is the book's first concrete sermon on what courage actually is — Atticus tells Jem at the end of the chapter: "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand."

What she wants

To die clean. To die owing the morphine nothing. To control her own dying, in a southern household where almost nothing else was hers to control.

What she fears

The morphine. Itself. Atticus's reveal is that her cruelty on the porch — and her welcome of Jem's reading — were both refusals to let the drug have the last word.

Key relationships

• Atticus — whom she insults publicly and to whom she sends, after her death, a small candy box containing a single perfect white camellia (a Snow-on-the-Mountain).
• Jem — who decapitates her bushes and then reads to her for a month.
• Scout — who comes along to the reading sessions and watches her brother lose his temper at an old woman who will not stop nodding off in the middle of his sentences.
• Jessie — her companion / nurse / aide, present in the sickroom scenes.

Visual identity

Very old; "ancient" by Scout's standards. Gaunt to skeletal, bedridden by the second half of the chapter. Skin "the color of a dirty pillowcase" (Lee's specific phrase). Thin white hair brushed back and pinned with two cheap bone hairpins. Pale watery rheumy blue eyes, cataract-clouded around the iris. Sparse almost-translucent white brows. Long narrow faintly hooked nose with a sharp tip. Prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks. Narrow jaw, small pointed chin; lower lip slightly wet, spit at the corners during withdrawal. A single sparse white hair on the chin. Veined knotted hands. Toothless in the later scenes — her dentures sit on the marble-topped dresser at the bedside. Daily presentation: porch wheelchair scenes in a high-collared dark dress with a shawl and lap blanket; sickbed scenes in a long white nightgown with a quilted pink bed jacket pulled across her shoulders. A brass alarm clock on the marble-topped dresser is the chapter's load-bearing prop.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Mrs. Dubose (canonical — the most common form)
• Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose

Discussion questions

• Atticus calls Mrs. Dubose "the bravest person I ever knew." Why her, and not Tom, or Boo, or himself?
• The morphine reveal at the end of Chapter 11 reframes everything she has said and done in the chapter. On a second read, what registers differently in her porch insults and her sickbed accusations?
• Atticus could have explained the morphine to Jem upfront. He chooses not to. Why?
• The white camellia in the candy box that arrives after her death is the only soft gesture she makes in the book. What is she telling Jem with it?
• The book uses Mrs. Dubose to define courage near the end of Part One — and then uses Atticus, Tom, the colored balcony, Heck Tate, and Boo to test that definition through Part Two. Whose courage in the rest of the book is closest to hers?